‘Study’ Claims Fox News Viewers Have Average IQ of 80

This is dated December 4th — last Tuesday — but it’s just getting around now. I’ll reproduce the whole news release on the next page, but here’s the basic story.

The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.

Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

The press release has a name — “P. Nichols” — and a phone number attached, so I called. I got a call back from a 202 area code. Okay, Washington, D.C. Not clear why the press release is datelined “Birmingham Alabama” but okay. Oddly, the phone number turns out to be a free Google Voice number.

The caller identified himself as P. Nichols but didn’t give a full first name. He was happy to be interviewed about the study, however. I’d identified myself as the Science Editor at PJ Media; my first question was where I could find a copy of the study.

He laughed a little and said “it’s a real study, done with standard polling techniques, but the study was funded by a Republican PAC, and I’m tied up in so many contracts and things that I can’t possibly show you the actual study.”

He went on to describe the methodology. “This Republican group had a particular result in mind, and we helped them find it. The way they put it was that they needed to separate the ‘TEA Party’ types from the Republican Party. ‘If your hand has cancer, you want to cut off the hand before it kills you,’ was their explanation of the motivation.”

The study, he said, was a four-year study with more than 5000 subjects. “We didn’t look at areas with educated populations, or in cities. In fact, we had trouble finding people in those categories who watched Fox News. Instead, we looked for uneducated, rural people — the people who actually believe that women’s bodies will prevent conception by rape. Those sorts of people.”

Interestingly, he also said the motivation for the study was the election results this year. Hmm.

Now, I’d Googled for the “Intelligence Institute” — all I found was a guy in Sydney, Australia, who does business intelligence consulting (and whose email I suspect will be a real horror by tomorrow). So I asked about that. “Oh, that’s a pseudonym,” Nichols said. “The people who funded this study wanted these results to come out, and the news release organization wouldn’t accept this unless we gave an organization name.”

The description of the population they selected struck me odd: rural, un-educated — wouldn’t that be selecting for people with lower IQ? He disagreed, but said, “The sample was selected with a goal in mind.”

I finished the interview by asking some summary questions. Were the results going to be published? “No, can’t publish the results, I wouldn’t risk the funding groups’ lawyers.” And the funding source was confidential? “Yes, I can’t identify the source of the funding.”

I pointed out that this added up to a not very convincing story — the population selection was, by his own admission, made with a predetermined outcome in mind, and he couldn’t identify the source, or the source of funding, and they were releasing it using an admittedly made-up institution as the supposed source. He agreed. He said, “The funding source wants these results out. They’d rather have people not believe it’s real than be identified.”

11 Responses to “‘Study’ Claims Fox News Viewers Have Average IQ of 80”

Ditto

I wonder what the results would be if you sampled the IQ of the “average Democrat,” but in selecting your criteria for subjects only went to local welfare office waiting rooms, abortion clinics or drug rehabilitation centers to do your polling?

On the other hand, if you want to poll for MSNBC viewers, just set up shop at any big Blue State metropolitan mental hospital.

Mully

Hard Right

The RINOs are mounting a full court press to get rid of Conservatives.
Rather than blame themselves and their incompetence, they want to blame those “evil Tea Party” types.
RINOs are like liberals (in many ways), they insist on trying the same thing over and over regardless of results proving that it will fail every time. Dole, McCain, and Romney are examples of this.
Now we are standing in the way of their unconditional surrender to obama and the dems. This is the response-democrat like attacks.

Dumbplumber

My first observation is that someone confused IQ with common sense. I have one client that is a nuclear physicist and he doesn’t know that his water pipes will burst when they freeze. Duh. Ditto with lawyers, doctors, investment bankers and other professionals of higher learning. Repairing frozen pipes is one of my main income streams.

On the other hand, most of my lesser educated neighbors know very well to protect their plumbing, ignore flim-flam artists, distrust politicians, lawyers and never, never, ever believe you can buy groceries with gold.

Hard Right

Greg

Democrats should also be tested. It might be discovered that the IQ decline is general, and that it coincides with some specific identifiable factor that wasn’t previously part of the American environment. The rise of “reality” TV could be one possibility. Of course, that might only be a symptom.

Nan G

That’s a hilarious sounding interview the PJ media got with the ”pollster.”
All one really has to do to compare IQs between Left and Right is look at all the ”Peggy” videos, the ObamaPhone videos, even today’s louder with Crowder’s FISCAL CLIFF, OH NOES!!http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0Hb5T-yHuEk
These people on the Left don’t know they hate the Left’s own policies and want policies from the Right!
That is pretty darn dumb!

Then there are the rallies.
One side can manage to control itself, down to their very bowels.
The other side….not so much.
Conservative rallies have no arrests, no litter and no poop piles.
The Liberal rallies have many arrests, piles of litter and even piles of poop.

Of course it was a FAKE ”study!”
There is no way people with 80 IQs can escape their liberal handlers long enough to vote their own viewpoints.

Greg

PPP’s first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard…and also declining in numbers.

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

The last remaining ACORN offices were finally closed on April 1, 2010. The organization had been totally extinct for over 2 1/2 years at the time of the 2012 election.

Oddly enough, the extinct organization continued to be active and influential in the imaginations of FOX News writers for some time after. In fact, according to FOX News, the extinct organization was behind an insidious campaign to unionize McDonalds restaurants and drive up the prices of hard-working Americans’ hamburgers as recently as a few days ago.

Ditto

Try the dumbing down of our public education system by mostly Democratic led administrations.

Maybe the moderate management at FOX should take a hint, seeing as the Establishment Republicans slammed them also in this fake report, and stop taking the Rino’s side in their reporting and presentation.